


My Worthiness is all my Doubt

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, F/M, Guilt, Sisters, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 09:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10214384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She had thought no one could understand and then she had seen his face.





	

Maybe Emma’s Chaplain would understand, Alice thought, even if Emma would reject that appellation, as Emma had a way of putting aside what she didn’t want to consider. Emma had hidden the picture of Frank in her drawer, among the underthings, and Papa’s ironically lost copy of _Paradise Lost_ might be found in Emma’s hope chest; she had put aside the family itself that night when she finally admitted the truth that had been obvious to all of them, to Emma herself though she wanted to pretend otherwise. For all her aspirations to virtue, Alice noticed Emma had left the house without any concern about what would happen to Belinda. Her sister liked to be a heroine, but only as it suited her.

The chaplain, Hotchkiss or Hopkins, Alice’s couldn’t recall, he might know what it was like, to have done things beyond regretting, that seemed to exist outside of the hands that had touched, the eyes that had seen, the mind that had planned, however imperfectly, the act itself. There was something in his eyes, a darkness that belied their clear, common blue, and the way he held his mouth that made her sure of his doubt. She had made a study of men; it was her natural inclination and her greatest talent in espionage and she could see what Emma could or would not. The man was broken and he worked at labors that were beneath a man of God to find his way back to integrity. What little she knew of the Papists suggested it was a pity he wasn’t one, unable to throw himself whole into God’s mercy, to lose the self he could no longer bear. She knew what that was, to be a person she was repulsed by, without even the excuse of being unrecognizable. She was familiar with her every flaw that had led her to where she was and it seemed the minister understood himself as well. She envied the worm its concealing stone and though Emma would not believe her, she shunned every looking-glass. 

Alice wondered if he heard them in the night, the way she did, the voices of the men she had lost, extinguished, destroyed. Tom called to her _Lolly, come find me!_ until it seemed she couldn’t bear it, knowing he was lost in this life and the next. The other man had no endearment for her but he called just as often. She would have liked to ask the guilty reverend if his penance was helping. Hers was not.

**Author's Note:**

> Returning to my rare-pair in a less romantic way, I have Alice and Henry both experiencing guilt and self-loathing and Emma on the outs.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
